In the spring of 2011 Vira Manko sent me a copy of the new book she had edited: “I Will Paint the Voice of the Wind: The Pysanky of Iryna Vakh.” The eggs inside were numerous, lovely and varied, and I tried my hand at a few of the designs. One was a sunflower motif pysanka; it didn’t turn out well for me, but I adjusted the flower a bit and decided to use it on goose eggs. And there I had fabulous success.

I have written a half dozen or so versions of this pysanka, almost all with a different background color. A few were white pysanky, but I also used various shades of blue. You can see them in the photos below.

Vakh uses fairly complicated dye schemes on her pysanky; on this one the outline is orange, and then it progresses through yellow, light green, olive green, and black. I used spot dyeing to apply the black, and bleached (for light colored eggs) after the greens. In the case of dark colored eggs, I dyed them directly from the greens. You can see a step-by-step description of the writing of these pysanky here.

The last pysanka depicted was written in 2014 as a 25th anniversary gift for my cousin Kathy. I did not like the color produced by dyeing it initially in Royal Blue, to I rubbed some of he color off and re-dyed in Light Blue. You can see the result below.